Texas is one of four states – including Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Missouri – with a state law that requires advance parental notification of any LGBTQ-related education, and allows parents to opt their children out (or requires opt-in), according to the Movement Advancement Project (MAP). Texas has also banned upwards of 625 books between 2022-2023 alone. But, what about website censorship?
Censorship in the United States goes deeper than opt-in policies and book bans. Students’ inaccessibility to investigate, learn and research certain websites online is strictly limited due decades-old laws. That’s why Cameron Samuels, GLAAD Media Institute alumni and founder of Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT), used the power of their story to show why it’s important to fight against censorship in Texas and around the country.
To add, SEAT is a movement of young people developing transferable skills and demonstrating youth visibility in policymaking. “By engaging in constructive action with active engagement in hands-on opportunities of advocacy and education, we’re creating a vehicle for driving civic transformation as we build a social movement for bettering our communities and dismantling oppressive power structures,” reads their website.
During their senior year of high school, Samuels won a petition against the district administration and the school board to unblock these sites. Consequently, those once blocked sites are accessible to high schoolers in the Katy Independent School Districts today.
Samuels and other students’ censorship challenges were at the center of two articles in USA Today and in The Markup. Both articles speak to the depths of censorship students are bound to at school, policing both what youth can say, research and read.
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Due to the Children’s Internet Protection Act, passed by Congress nearly 25 years ago, school districts must block obscene or harmful images to qualify for federally-subsidized internet access. “But the records, from 16 districts across 11 states, show they go much further,” reads the USA Today article.
The article reports that Samuels was once researching news sites for a digital arts class when they ran into a block on “The Advocate,” an LGBTQ news site.
Any site Samuels tried to access that offered LGBTQ resources, education, or news were all blocked. This also included GLAAD.org.
“The district was blocking access to potentially lifesaving resources for me and my LGBT identity,” Samuels told The Markup.
For some districts around the country these blocks also include: inaccessibility to sex education websites, abortion information, resources for LGBTQ teenagers, NASA, and suicide prevention, says the article.
Some of the messages students might see look like this: “The site you have requested has been blocked because it does not comply with the filtering requirements as described by the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA).”
CIPA is a federal law passed in 2000 that requires schools seeking subsidized internet access to keep students from seeing “obscene or harmful images online—especially porn.”
“Cameron Samuels first encountered blocks to LGBTQ+ web pages during the 2018–19 school year while working on a class project as a ninth grader in Texas’ Katy Independent School District. Like Rockwood, Katy uses ContentKeeper to filter the web; to Samuels, the LGBTQ+ category of blocks felt like a personal attack,” writes investigative reporter Tara García Mathewson.
The American Library Association (ALA) speaks to all forms of censorship citing that “public schools and public libraries, as public institutions, have been the setting for legal battles about student access to books, the removal or retention of ‘offensive’ material, regulation of patron behavior, and limitations on public access to the internet.”
However, their call to action is to fight censorship new and old.
Censorship is often framed under “hyperbolic and misleading rhetoric” leading to the banning of several thousands of books covering a range of topics and themes written, researched, and vetted for young audiences. “Overwhelmingly, book bans target books on race or racism or featuring characters of color, as well as books with LGBTQ+ characters.”
Some activists like, Library Futures, believe the present and future of fighting against censorship will be against further book bans, and content regulation like the recently introduced bill called Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).
To learn more on how to fight censorship in your school visit ALA’s websites. Check your voter registration at GLAAD.org/vote.
